Dickstein on the '60sToo Strait Are the Gates of Eden

GATES OF EDEN
American Culture in the Sixties
By Morris Dickstein
Basic Books. $11.95

That the '60s are at present discredited should come as no surprise
to anyone with a sense of historical rhythm. Even if the accreditation
procedure were not left up to a social group--intellectuals, in the
broad sense that includes statusy journalists as well as academic
bigdomes--whose tastes and interests were poorly served by the period,
we would be on a reaction cycle right now. (After all, what are people
going to think of 1977 in 1984?) But the reaction hasn't been as
extreme as some hope and others fear. Misgivings and recriminations
about the excesses of the past are not tantamount to cultural
conservatism. It's one thing to blame a philosophical detour or a
blown year or an old love affair or a dead friend on the '60s, another
to take the position advocated most forcefully by Daniel Bell in his
recent book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism--that in
its pathological self-indulgence the culture of the '60s exemplified
the American malaise rather than countering it.

For most people under 40 who care about culture at all the '60s
were fun. Getting through them wasn't so very difficult or unpleasant,
and it isn't only diehard hippie nostalgiacs who retain fond memories
of the time. What's more, no matter what they may say about the '60s,
there are few young cultural who do not continue to take advantage of
passť ideas about liberation in their lives, from details of leisure
and style to the structure of work and sexual relationships. For
anyone honest enough to recognize this, to reject the '60s to reject
oneself.

Morris Dickstein, a Columbia '61 graduate born in 1940 on the Lower
East Side who now teaches English at Queens College and serves as an
editor of Partisan Review, voices the judicious retrospective
enthusiasm of such beneficiaries of the '60s in a widely reviewed new
book called Gates of Eden: American Culture in the
Sixties. Although the text is not as millenarian in its concerns
as the title would imply, Dickstein is happy enough to acknowledge
that the '60s were good for him. They seem to have opened him up
politically (although he is so vehemently anti-anticommunist that I
suspect he was fledged elsewhere) and sexually. At the very least,
they made it possible for him to mention these personal matters in the
course of a piece of criticism, which for an academic is liberation
aplenty. Given the formalism and presumed "objectivity" that once
again dominates serious cultural discussion, Dickstein's need to bring
his own experiences to bear on his analysis is a significantly
'60s-ish impulse. Its effect is to bring what he has to say down to
human scale; almost by definition, he does not pontificate or claim
absolute validity, and that's gratifying.

Because Dickstein candidly accepts his own limitations--that is,
his own identity--it is possible to dismiss some of his odder critical
judgments ad hominem, a method as useful as it is taboo. Thus, his
rather excessive distaste for Leslie Fiedler--a thinker just as
valuable, in his flawed way, as the flawed Herbert Marcuse, whom
Dickstein admires--is probably related to Fiedler's admittedly
repugnant anticommunism. And his unmitigated preference for
Maileresque, Voice-style, "confessional" new journalism over
the quasi-fictional Tom Wolfe mode (in an uncharacteristically
arrogant moment, Dickstein says of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test: "stupefyingly boring--I got through only half of it") would
seem to reflect his discovery of the personal in his own writing.

The payoff for such critical self-indulgence is several relatively
brave and--in terms of Dickstein's milieu--idiosyncratic judgments. It
takes some guts for an academic moving in highbrow circles to single
out Catch-22 as "the best novel of the '60s" or to recall that
Cat's Cradle remains a fine little book even though Vonnegut
has since diddled his reputation away. It takes even more to put
Dylan, the Beatles, and the Stones in an equivalent context; as
Dickstein observes, "many highbrow critics are still unable to
acknowledge . . . that the line between high culture and popular
culture gave way in the '60s and on some fronts was erased entirely."
A final bonus: Dickstein's wonderful analysis of Paul Goodman's prose,
which clearly grew out of personal inspiration.

But Dickstein's affable conviction that a critic must remain
himself has far more serious consequences than a few judgments up or
down--it slants his book so severely as to distort it altogether. For,
like most English professors, Dickstein is in love with the written
word. When Daniel Bell tries to dissect "the sensibility of the '60s,"
he deals with painting, sculpture, and theatre as well as fiction;
even though (as James Wolcott remarked to me recently) Bell makes it
seem as if he never went as far as to experience much of this work
firsthand, he knows it would be obtuse to act as if sensually
apprehended culture wasn't a key to his subject. But although
Dickstein would deny it, that is an implicit message of Gates of
Eden. His discussion of the music of "rock," notably halting and
imprecise in a treatise rarely distinguished by vivid description, is
his only venture into nonverbal aesthetics. By the end of the book,
his frank "personal" admission at the outset--"I've slighted cultural
phenomena for which I felt little affinity"--seems like nothing more
than an easy way to forestall one obvious criticism.

Dickstein's admission that he has "chosen to exploit slippery
ambiguities of the word culture" is equally suspect; for exploitation
is all too unambiguously what has taken place. It's acceptable to
treat works of art as paradigms of "the assumptions and mores of a
whole society," and laudable (although not as adventurous as Dickstein
seems to think) to relate the evolution of (literary) form to more
general historical developments. For Dickstein, however, to
concentrate on the intersection between art and society--on
"culture"--is to submerge in convention; sometimes I felt as though he
defined culture by remembering what the brightest and most au courant
graduate students were reading back then.

So, on the one hand, Dickstein's sense of the Important Subject is
completely predictable--there's no art for art's sake here, no
indigestible weirdness. Is it because he believes off-the-wall tastes
lead a narrow cultural life that he offers no surprises, or does he
simply enjoy no such tastes? Except for '40s avatar Delmore Schwartz
and the usual roll call of black novelists, he doesn't discuss a
single nonstandard author. Whether the specific name turned out to be
Grace Paley or Ross MacDonald (whom I admire), John Hawkes or
Jacqueline Susann (whom I don't admire), or someone I'd barely
recognize (whom I might admire), I would have valued a crotchet or two
because crotchets are the mark of an inquisitive critical
intelligence. Instead, Gates of Eden could double as a text in
'60s Lit.

And on the other hand, Dickstein dares no real innovations of
method. One thing that makes the word culture so slippery is that the
concrete connections between a society's art and its people--how
artworks actually affect "assumptions and mores"--are very difficult
to figure out. But Dickstein, for all his readiness to allude to the
goings-on in his own world--which in the '60s centered around
Columbia--hardly makes a pass at such problems.

This omission glares because the '60s were uniquely, preeminently,
and unprecedentedly a time of mass bohemianism--a time when millions
of Americans of divergent class backgrounds aspired to a vaguely
artistic (a/k/a "creative" or "self-expressive") life
style. Popular-culture critics have proved best suited to think about
the problematic intersections this phenomenon created--as in Greil
Marcus's struggle with the art/audience nexus in the Randy Newman
chapter of Mystery Train, or Michael Arlen's evocative analyses
of TV news. But avant-gardists and modernists have also
contributed--see the theatre criticism of Richard Schechner or John
Lahr, the dance criticism of Jill Johnston or Kenneth King, or
invaluable polemics like Harold Rosenberg's "Politics of Illusion." Up
against such writing, Dickstein's modesty looks like timidity.

For finally this is a timid book. By sticking close to fiction,
Dickstein neatly avoids all of the decade's more recondite
avant-gardisms, and, fiction maven though he may be, also fails to
mention two quintessentially '60s genres, science fiction and
pornography, which is perhaps a clue to one totally incomprehensible
omission: William S. Burroughs. Christopher Lasch (in a page-one
review in the Times Book Review) and Walter Clemons (in a lead
review in Newsweek) may conclude--in miraculously similar
language--that Dickstein "distinguishes between good and bad rock
music," but in fact he foregoes suggestive challenges--Jimi Hendrix,
say, or the Velvet Underground, who once wrote a song for Delmore
Schwartz--for an uninspired (if surprisingly adequate) account of the
usual triumvirate; what's more, he has obviously failed to get what is
generally considered (by critics) the Rolling Stones' greatest album,
Exile on Main Street, which happened to appear in 1972 and
which also happens to be by far their most difficult
work. Again and again I got the feeling that Dickstein wasn't trying
hard enough--that he hoped to make the decade acceptable by presenting
it at its neatest and most received. There is no surer way to warm a
culture critic's heart than to argue that a decade is summed up by its
novels.

My initial judgment wasn't so harsh. There was something about the
sweet reason of Dickstein's tone that I found attractive; he even got
me to read Barthelme's City Life (which I liked, though not as
much as Dickstein) and Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 (Dickstein
should delve into Steely Dan, whose music provides a physical
correlative that transforms the idea of California into something more
than a hackneyed abstraction). The theoretical limitations of the book
were offset, I thought, by its propaganda potential--it could begin
the re-education of a cultural establishment that has rejected the
decade whole. But as a respecter of the '60s I should have known
better than to hedge my bets. Cultural philistines like Hilton Kramer,
for whom any deprecation of the '50s smacks of Stalinism, fume at
Dickstein as if he were Jerry Rubin, while anti-'60s moderates like
Christopher Lasch find in Dickstein's "judicious sympathy" more
sophisticated and efficient fuel for their own arguments.

Me, I enjoyed the '60s, and I profited from them, but that wasn't
all: I cherished their promise. That promise included liberating new
contexts for art, a political usefulness that did not diminish its
pleasure or its truth, and even a redefinition of the senses. The
promise is fainter now, but I haven't forgotten it. Dickstein seems to
have given it up with a sigh of relief.